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Abraham Lincoln 



AN ADDRESS DELIVi: 



12, 1909 



By ROBERT S. RANTOUL 



3ALEM, MASS 

PRIKT-EI) FOB TH-E ESSEX i: 

1900 



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ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE ESSEX INSTITUTK 

AND THE CITY GOVERNMENT OF SALEM AT 

THE TABERNACLE CHURCH, SALEM, 

FEBRUARY 12, 1909. 



By Robert S. Raktoul. 



We are met here, my friends, to pay our tribute of 
affectiou and respect to the remarkable man whose name 
is on all lips today. A tragic death has closed a stormy 
scene : 

" Afterlife's fitful fever he sleeps well! 
" Nothing can touch him further." 

No patriotic citi/,en, wlio had reached mature age during 
the last ten years of Lincoln's life, feels anything less 
than a sense of i)ersonal obligation and gratitude to the 
strong deliverer who served us in those bitter days. I 
speak for the generation that knew the agony of 
the First Bull Run. I speak for the generation 
that felt the deep rehgious joy of Richmond's fall. We 
cif the North, who had lifted him from obscurity to place, 
and who were ini'lined, :it times, to think him slow in heed 
ing our behests, liave come to feel that strength and not' 
weakness dictated his delay. They of the South, who 
did their best to jiersuade themselves that he was a ty- 
rant and a monster, now lift their voices to swell the 



2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

universal chorus of acclaim. A man of Peace, he had 
marshalled armies comparable in numbers with the hosts 
of Xerxes and Alexander and Hannibal and Casar, So 
blind was he to the honor of it all, — so insensible to 
pride, — that as often as a way seemed open to him by 
which he might delegate his Atlantean task, he sighed to 
be allowed to shift to other shoulders a burden which he 
felt and said was greater than Washington had been called 
to bear. Wielding an authority the most absolute in 
the whole range of Constitutional Administration, he 
subordinated self to duty always, and made the world to 
see and to know how greater than the conqueror that taketh 
a city is he who ruleth his own spirit. No pride of an- 
cestry, — no Circe-promise that he might found a dynasty 
or a state, lured this man on. Nothing impelled him but 
the single wish that he might be helpful to his kind, and 
the natural ambition every good man feels to fill well the 
place vt^here fate has put him. The debt due his memory 
from every citizen and from every soldier who prayed in 
that dark hour that the country might live, is a debt 
which cannot be exaggerated and will not be forgotten. 
Child of the Masses, lifted to command upon the shoulders 
of the Masses, he stands there, — simple — unpretentious — 
self-poised — genuine — sincere — the peer of princes — arbi- 
ter of peace and war — balancing in his hand the fate of 
peoples ! 

Lincoln reached the age of citizenship in 1830. What 
had been his si^ecial training, if any, for taking a man's 
part in government I shall consider later. Let me at- 
tempt first to outline the conditions with which he found 
himself surrounded in state and nation. Jackson was 
President. He was branding nullification as treason, and was 
making no secret of his purpose to hang the first nuUifier 
who should commit an overt act. The Federalist Party, 
which had called the Union into being, had wrecked itself 
through its internal discords and its undue assumptions. 
Webster was at the zenith of his power, pronouncing his 
historic expositions of Constitutional Constraction and of 
the value of the Federal Union. The protest against 
hide-bound dogma in both religion and politics was fast 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 3 

making head. The great raih'oad-movement which was 
to create the West — hurrying into the unbroken prairie 
the old-world redundancy of population, to bring back 
to the sea-board for a foreign market the garnered products 
of their tillage, — was about to demonstrate that the 
upper valley of the Mississippi and its confluents, with 
its unprobed depth of alluvial deposit, — with its capacity 
for sustaining life almost without limit, — with its water- 
courses and great lakes, — with its untouched wealth of 
timber-lands and mineral resources, — was tiie natural Seat 
of Empire on this Contineut. 

Such was the atmosphere, — bracing and broadening, — 
from which Lincoln drew his early inspiration. Ken- 
tucky and Illinois, the states of his birth and later resi- 
dence, touched both the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, 
and Indiana, in which he passed a few years, on the way 
from his Kentucky birthplace to his home in Illinois, 
touched the Ohio. New birth of a new soil, the child 
drank in the physical not more than the political atmos- 
phere of the new-born state. He w^as looking on at an Em- 
pire in the making. The systems of the elder world in- 
cline their peoples to leave, to favored orders of men, 
their political and religious concerns, and to limit their 
interests to industry and amusement. Not so with us. 
Every man-child born into these United States makes 
haste to take his part in the great drama of statecraft 
playing before his eyes. He plays at politics when barely 
out of skirts, as at a national game of which the counters 
are fortunes, — the prizes dignities, — the stake an Empire.. 

Lincoln found himself not ill-prepared to take his part, 
— the born subject of a dual citizenship, thrown into a 
rude and unformed society. The people of this coun- 
try, in breaking away from old-world systems and tra- 
ditions, had established for themselves two distinct 
repositories of supreme authority. For us, the powers of 
government did not find their way down through magis- 
trates and dignitaries from a single heaven-anointed source. 
They were drawn directly from the sanction of the gov- 
erned. Officials were agents of the people, answerable 
directly to the governed, and their powers returnable, 



4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

from time to time, to the people governed. Thus govern- 
ment was a limited agency, for securing certain well- 
defined requirements of the people^ and was not in any 
sense a prerogative of the magistracy created for such tem- 
porary service. For certain broad, national concerns the 
people had constituted as their agent a federal organiza- 
tion. And for certain other much more numerous and 
intimate, but more limited concerns, the people, according 
to their locality, had constituted state organizations for 
their agents. These last represented the colonial settle- 
ments founded long before, and grown strong in local sen- 
timent as well as in the military vigor learned in the 
rough school of Indian warfare and in straggles against 
the mother-land for an alloted share of autonomx'. In its 
limited sphere, each government was sovereign and su- 
preme, and they both equally drew their authority from the 
single undisputed source of power, — the people's will. 
Recognized attributes of sovereignity such as the power of 
life and death, — of eminent domain and taxation, — of re- 
pelling invasion and repressing insurrection, inhere in the 
States. Other recognized attributes of sovereignty, such 
as the making of treaties, — declaring war, — regulating 
inter-state and foreign trade, — were inhibited to the States 
and inhere in the Federal Union. All is delicately ad- 
justed by written constitutions to be construed in the last 
resort by a Federal Court. While the original states of 
the sea-board antedated the Union and had created it, and 
while some of the Federalists of the constructive period, 
— living before the Union had been cemented in blood, — 
felt that, having made it, they could unmake it at their 
pleasure — for they had joined it, some of them, doubtfully 
and with much reluctance, — the states of the Northwest, on 
the other hand, had no origin anterior to the Federal Union. 
They were the very creatures of the Federal Union itself, 
looking to no earlier source, — never having recognized any 
luotective power outside the Federal Government to which 
they could turn for help. Lincoln might have been counted 
among the founders of Illinois. When he went there he 
found little but hopeless debt, public works on paper, vast 
natural resources, exhaustless vigor and unbounded faith. 
Coin was a curiosity. Cured hams were a legal tender. 



BY KOBBKT S. RANTOUL. 5 

Id 1830 an angry dispute was growing up between sec- 
tions of the national domain, unsympathetic and a good 
deal unlike, but which had been forced into a common 
Federal bond by the imperious necessity for National 
Defense. The first defensive league had been consummated 
in 1774. The necessity was then perceived of bringing all 
the colonies without exception into a Federal bond. Fail- 
ing this, those colonies withholding their assent would be 
free to open negotiations with a foreign enemy for a footing 
on this continent, and resisUuice to Great Britain must 
come to naught. To secure this unity, such concessions 
were made as were found indispensible to cementing a de- 
fensive union against Great Britain. One of these con- 
cessions related to slavery. Slavery, though discredited, 
was not then odious in any part of the world. It existed 
in every one of the colonies. The newspapers of New 
England and of the country at large are filled with an- 
)iouncements warranting this assertion, and there are 
standing in Massachusetts to-day Colonial meeting-houses 
in which special provisions made for the worship of slaves 
can still be traced. Many of the substantial stone fences 
marking the boundaries of early New England homesteads 
are the handiwork of slaves. Both Indian captives and 
imported West India negros had been bought and sold 
here from traditional times, lint slavery was an exotic at 
the North. Nowhere were the blacks numerous enough 
to be seriously reckoned with as a social factor, and, being 
iiousehold servants, they were treated humanely. 

In the Southern colonies Africans and their descendants 
constituted substantially the whole labor element of the 
section. The industries of the South lent themselves read- 
ily to negro labor, and the vast scale upon which their pe- 
culiar industries were conducted, as well as the climate of 
the region, fostered the system. Of course the blacks, now 
and then, escaped from this compnlsory employment and 
sought refuge in the states where blacks were fewer and 
their labors lighter. Together with fugitive apprentices, 
and criminals who were fugitives from justice, these escap- 
ing slaves were included in a constitutional stipulation as 
between the colonies forming the Federal compact that 



6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

all fugitives of these three classes should be restored 
upon demand. While the promise of restoration on 
motion of the States was thought to be sufficient, and has 
proved to be ample, in the case of run-away apprentices 
and criminaJs, it was found necessary to pledge the inter- 
vention of the Federal Government in order to secure 
the rendition of fugitive slaves. Right or wrong, this 
provision was seen to be inevitable. Without it the ordi- 
nance of 1787, consecrating the whole Northwestern Ter- 
ritory to freedom, could never have been passed, nor 
could the Federal Union have been effected. But the 
underlying fact upon which rests the whole moral justi- 
fication of the war which saved the Union must not be 
lost sight of. No principle of law or morals is better es- 
tablished than this, that contracts are to be construed and 
interpreted with a view to the conditions which surround 
the making of them. All thoughtful people, South as 
well as North, — the leading statesmen of the South more 
decidedly than any, — at that time regarded negro slavery 
in the South as an undesirable system, condemned by 
modern views of political economy and morals, and only 
waiting to be got rid of as rapidly as might be without un- 
due violence to existing social and industrial demands. 
Accordingly the Constitution provided for the suppression 
of the slave-trade on and after an approaching date. It 
avoided the introduction of the word " slave, " resorting, 
in every necessary reference to the indefensible system, 
to a cumbersome circumlocution. Jefferson in his draft 
of the Declaration had enumerated the forcing of slavery 
upon the Colonies as one of our grounds of complaint 
against Great Britain. Leading Southern men, in face of 
the archaic legislation of their states, and greatly to the 
discomfiture of adherents of the discredited form of la- 
bor, — the free negro was regarded as a nuisance and the 
intelligent negro as a menace, — in face of this opposition, 
leading public men of the South, among them Washing- 
ton, persisted in freeing their slaves by will and providing 
for their instruction. But for the invention of the Cotton 
Gin, which suddenly made cotton-growing vastly lucra- 
tive, and built up a world-wide market for tlie product, — 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 7 

it is not impossible that slavery at the South might have 
gradually yielded in the course of years to the advancing 
sense of humanity, and have been disposed of without 
violence, giving way to industrial systems in which the 
imported negroes and their descendants might have re- 
mained to till in peace the soil on which most of them 
were born, with at least as near an approach to justice and 
fair dealing as they now enjoy, and the South might have 
been spared the devastation, the madness of her dominant 
class invoked upon her head. But this was not to be. 

Conceiving that while she enjoyed the control of the 
cotton-market of the world, she was superior to political 
dictation and almost, it would seem, to moral restraint, 
the united cotton-industry of the South faced squarely 
about, — defied the deliberate judgment of the civilized 
world pronounced in its arraignment of chattel-slavery,— 
and arrogantly proposed the indefinite extension and per- 
petuity of it, and the reopening of the slave trade. This, 
with a reenforcing of the legal provisions exacted by the 
South of the Federal government, for the return of fugitive 
slaves escaping to the free states, and the proposal to 
enforce, in the common territories of the nation, the same 
property rights in slave property which were guaranteed 
in other kinds of property, brought on a crisis which 
could probably have been met in no other way but by 
a resort to arms. And the final verdict of history will 
record the fact that, in supposing they could, while con- 
sulting no interests or preferences but their own, turn 
their backs on their traditional distrust of slavery, — its 
thriftlessness, its immorality, its perpetual night-mare 
dread of servile insurrection, — that they could turn their 
backs upon all this at will, and force their fellow-citizens 
to help them extend and perpetuate the monstrous anach- 
ronism — a policy which united against them in advance the 
population of the North, — more than ready as it was for 
every consession compatible with manhood, — a population 
out-ranking them two to one in numbers, wealth, mechan- 
ical capacity, industrial development, general intelligence, 
— m every manly attribute except audacious courage, — in 
taking this fatal step, the Southern people will be found 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

to have committed the most stupendous folly which dis- 
credits the statesmanship of modern times. 

The Cotton States entered upon the struggle with three 
distinct possibilities of success. The}' hoped for the in- 
tervention of England. They hoped for a political disrup- 
tion of the North. They questioned the financial suffi- 
ciency of the Federal Government. 1 must not pause to 
discuss the grounds upon which these hopes were based. 
It was Lincoln's task to defeat them all. Who could say 
that a people impatient of national debt, and of direct tax- 
ation as was the America of 1860, would patiently, for 
years after the first flush of battle, subject its industries 
to the burden of an enormous tax ? Who could say that 
the North, welded together by the first assault upon the 
Union, would hold itself together when the war, dragging 
along through varying fortunes of victory and defeat, 
should more and more take on that anti-slavery complex- 
ion which had been from the outset foreordained ? Who 
could say that the governing class of England, bred to re- 
gard our Union as a rope of sand, and honestly supposing 
when they heard the signal-gun at Sumter that they 
were listening to its knell,— who could say that Monar- 
chical England would suppress the longing to intervene in 
behalf of her natural ally, our t)aronial, cotton-growing 
South, — would suppress this natural longing through all 
the rasping irritations of a naval conflict, — through all the 
terrible pangs of the cotton-hunger that was paralizing 
her mills? While the North must maintain its solvency 
immaculate, and subsist its armies through the medium of 
crushing loans, the South, on the other hand, was under 
no such necessity. It was enlisted in a desperate under- 
taking, in which financial credit was a secondary' concern, 
and in w'hich the impressment of private property for 
public uses at once became the accepted resource. And, 
moreover, it had, as a momentary reliance to fall back 
upon, the great cotton-crop of 18()0, so far as this could 
be smuggled through the blockade to England or could be 
sold through our lines to meet the daily necessities of the 
North, and this, while it lasted, furnished the sinews of war. 
Whether the North could maintain its political solidarity 



BY ROBERT S. KANTOUL. D 

was at all times in doubt. Every dubious or disloyal ut- 
terance finding its way into the northern press was repro- 
duced without delay in the journals of the South. The 
hope of British aid, stimulated by the London Times which 
was known to be in touch with Palmerston and Russell, — 
the hope of British aid almost justified by the Trent 
Affair, and by the fitting out of the Alabama, — was only 
abandoned when English mill-owners had, perforce, found 
sources of a supply of cotton outside of the Confederacy. 

Such in rough outline was the stupendous problem 
confronting Lincoln. He could not delegate it. If he 
failed to solve it, the country failed with him, and with 
him failed the experiment of representative democracy. In 
some ways, but not in all, his training had schooled him 
for the task. It was a task for which no man could be 
wholly fit. For no such task had ever before confronted 
mortal man. There were no precedents. His native vigor 
must lift him up to cope with the occasion. He must 
grow as the growing demands of his problem develo|)ed. 
He had ready to his hand, as a nucleus for the military 
force he was to need, a little standing army, honeycoral)ed 
with treason in rank and file. He had for a navy with wliich 
to maintain the blockade of a coast-line longer than was 
ever before essayed, a few obsolete sea-craft, manned by 
ofiicers and crews whose loyalty awaited an uncertain test. 
When he came to Washington from Illinois, charged to 
pick up and knit together the shattered fragments of the 
expiring administration, it was found unsafe for him to 
approach his capital by day. For temporizing and trifling 
in his utterances along the way he was harshly condemned 
when it would have been a fatal breach of trust to betray 
by a single word the solemn thoughts that were weighing 
down his soul. The actual condition of things at NVash- 
ington was not suspected by the country at large. Ex- 
Governor Clifford and Ex-Attorney General Phillips, both 
of Massachusetts, were in Washington a month before 
Lmeoln's accession to office, engaged in an effort to ad- 
just, with Attorney General Stanton of Buchanan's cabi- 
net, a disputed boundary between Massachusetts and 
Rhode Island. They found the Attorney-General of the 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

United States sleeping at night and quartered by day in 
his office, and barricaded, and every way prepared for the 
hourly- expected attack upon the archives of his depart- 
ment. 

But at last Lincoln took the oath and found his lips 
unsealed. He gave utterance to a magnanimous appeal 
to the humanity and manhood of the warring states. If 
anything could have given pause to the madness of the 
Southern heart, that might have been hoped from Lincoln's 
words. Through him the North had spoken, and the 
great mass of moderate Northern men felt that their best 
thought had found voice at last. Events rushed on. South 
Carolina fired the signal-gun, precipitating upon the 
country a contest for which the Southern States had been 
for months prepared, and for which we of the North 
were so little ready, that our own Senator Wilson declared, 
in Mechanic Hall, at the close of the Presidential cam- 
paign that, inasmuch as he sat day by day, elbow to elbow, 
with Jefferson Davis in the Senate Chamber, he was able 
to say, and we might take it on his word, that the war 
threats were bluster and that there would be no fighting. 
But the war was upon us. Doctor Furness of Philadelphia, 
who had stood for years in the forefront of liberal thought 
in the Middle States, preached before the Barton Square 
Congregational Society on the Sunday after Sumter, and 
pictured the South as the spoiled child of the Federal 
household, needing vigorous discipline which he believed 
she was about to get. 

Weeks were consumed in the government service, in 
separating those who did from those who did not regard 
the sanctity of an oath. Then came the mad rush to 
anns. Lincoln must not go too fast. He was no soldier. 
General Scott, the Nestor of the army, his natural advi- 
ser, was disqualified by years. To whom should he turn? 
He had made up his cabinet on a unique plan which showed 
his magnanimity, if nothing else. In order to unite 
around his administration the constituent masses of the 
Northern people, for he needed the support of all, he had 
invited to seats in his cabinet not only life-long political 
opponents who had lately become identified with the com- 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. IL 

mon movement against slavery-extension, but also personal 
rivals who had contested with him the nomination for the 
Presidency. This was a distinct demonstration of his mental 
fibre. Seward, perhaps his strongest opponent, and 
Chase, who had a powerful backing in the West, and Cam- 
eron of Pennsylvania, and Bates of Missouri, all found 
themselves among his official family,|[and tlie fust months 
of the war were consumed in finding out how far the new 
President could trust his political rivals with his political 
secrets. He could see no factions — only his suffering coun- 
try. All help was welcome, and all found their place. The 
Secretary of War made way for Buchanan's Attorney 
General, Stanton. Seward, perceiving that Lincoln and 
not he was to dominate the situation, became an invalu- 
able aid. And in Chase, the President, absolutely lacking 
himself in the financial instinct, was fortunate in finding at 
the start a financial minister whom, personal ambitions 
aside, he could trust without reserve. 

But campaigns must be mapped out and battles fought 
and at first Lincoln, in the selection of Commanders, ap- 
plied much the same system which he had followed in the 
selection of his cabinet. It was the People's war, — not 
his, and wherever he could clearly discern a popular de- 
mand for the appointment of a General Officer, he made it 
with, at times, all too little regard for his own opinion of 
its fitness. (Japtains of capacity not only waited to be 
distinguished by events from the common mass. Captains 
of capacity had even to be created from the raw material. 
For all were alike unschooled in the grand strategy of 
continentiil warfare. While future heroes were making 
their dreadful mistakes and learning their lesson at a ter- 
rible expenditure of the best blood we had to give, it was 
Lincoln's fate to be super-adding to the agony of his self- 
distrust the crushing dread that the countiy's faith in his 
integrity might not bear the strain. But, from an early 
period of the war until his second election, the confidence 
of the miisses of the North, — the affection of tlie soldiers 
he always had, — unmoved by the virulence of his critics and 
by his assumptions of power which nothing short of 
down-right necessity could excuse, — the confidence of the 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

people ill Ills unseltish devotiou to duty, — in his homely, 
genuine good-sense, — in his transparent frankness, — in his 
largeness of purpose, — in his instinctive weighing of con- 
flicting interest and claims so that each might have his due, 
— in his all-embracing tenderness of heart, — this deep as- 
surance of the highest attributes of statesmanship grew 
from day to day, and made it seem then, as it seems now, 
to be impossible that any other hand could have held tlie 
helm so well. 

Lincoln was born in Kentucky, of parents who had 
drifted there from Virginia, of which Commonwealth 
Kentucky had been a province until the admission of the 
latter into the Union. The generations of Lincoln's au- 
cestrj', tarrying in Virginia, were not many, and before 
reaching Virginia they had been settled among the Dutch 
and Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Jersey Welshmen. 
Earlier than this they had traced back to New England. 
Lincoln is an honored name in ^Massachusetts, and a re- 
search now in progress is expected to vindicate the tradi- 
tional claim that Lincoln's earliest American iincestor 
was a Pilgrim pioneer of the South Shore of Massachu* 
setts Bay. The stay in Kentucky was brief. When he 
was but seven, the Lincolns made their way across the 
Ohio, into the free and fertile area of the great North- 
west, making a few j-ears' sojourn on their march through 
Indiana and finally striking root in Sangamon County 
in the Mississippi River-basin of Illinois. In Kentucky, 
as in Virginia, they had lived in what was nominally slave 
territory. Slavery was little more than a tradition in 
Kentucky. But the slightest taint of the pest was enough 
to pollute the social atmosphere. In no community where 
capital owns labor can free labor compete for employment 
or the self-respecting free mechanic lift his head. In Vir- 
ginia and in Kentucky, the Lincolns were of that non- 
descript class which, lacking capital, owned little land and 
no slaves, and which, unable to command employment 
from the capitalists who owned both, enjoyed the consid- 
eration neither of master nor of slave. In Southern Indi- 
ana, where the Lincolns passed twelve years, and again in 
Illinois, they found themselves members of a new comma- 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 13 

nity recruited largely from Kentucky, but forever ex- 
empt from the blasting touch of slavery by virtue of the 
Ordinance of 1787 which Essex County, let us remember 
it with pride today, had the chief share in securing. A 
few blacks, who had yielded to the loyal affection of their 
race, had followed their masters into the new territory, 
and, though moved by one of the noblest instincts of man- 
kind, were instrumental, few as they were, in keeping alive 
tlie jealousies which poor white laborers are sure to enter- 
tain against a cheaper labor than their own. Thus the 
fast-growing populations of the Mississippi River-basin 
became the home of an inhuman hatred of the negro, — of 
antagonism to negro labor, and to every remote ai)proach 
to industrial or social equality, in a society so crude as 
almost to lack distinctions of any other kind than those 
of color. Here on the Mississippi River-bank, not far 
from the homestead of the Lincolns, was the scene, soon 
after their arrival, of the ghastly murder of Lovejoy, — 
a crime destined to take on national importance, in that 
it unlocked the lips of Wendell Phillips. Here, a little 
latter, was the scene of the sojourn of Dred Scott and 
his Missouri master, from whose four years' stay on free 
soil the slave deduced a, claim for the restoration of his 
natural rights, which betrayed the Chief Justice of the 
supreme tribunal of the countr}-, then under the dictation 
of the Southern oligarchy, into the preposterous position, 
false in history as it was vile in morals, that, traditionally, 
from the settlement of the country, negroes had no rights. 
This pronouncement, hopelessly unsound in law as it 
was seen to be, was a logical necessity of the attitude the 
Cotton States had assumed. It fixed the low- water mark 
of Southern retrogression. The alleged right of the mas- 
ter to the person and service of the slave rested upon 
nothing but superior force. Captives in war, since a pre- 
historic past, could either be dispatched or, if their lives 
were spared, could be held as slaves. To say that bond- 
men had no rights was to deny that they were human. 
A code that denied to human beings, because born in a 
certain social status, the right to their own muscles, — 
to their own earning's, — to their own children, — threw the 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

negro back on the natural law of self-protection and fur 
nished every justification for the violence, the sleepless 
apprehension of which made a night-mare at times of 
Southern life, — made habitanc}- in some parts of the 
South like living on a slumbering volcano. 

For years, the spokesmen of the South had allowed 
themselves to argue that their slaves were contented and 
devoted to the whites, and that the master-class had nothmg 
to apprehend from them. Doubtless this was true of 
most of them, for most of them were well treated, and the 
loyal devotion they displayed throughout the war justified 
this confidence. But always there was an uneasy, threat- 
ening minority. The moment the agitation of the slavery 
issue became general and acute, the South, both in and 
out of Congress, showed an utter want of reliance on this 
ante-war philosophy. John Brown with his nineteen pike- 
men dealt it a death-blow. When he appeared at Harper's 
Ferry and invited the negroes of the region into a camp 
of refuge, panic was the only word which could describe 
the effect of Ids movement on Virginia, — although the 
blacks never evinced a willingness to join him. The pre- 
vailing expression throughout the South was one of dread 
of servile insurrection and of the horrors of San Domingo. 
The South seemed astounded, when the test was applied, 
to find how slight was its reliance on these old-time assur- 
ances. And this slavery, let it be noted, was the cherished 
— the much lauded, the peculiar institution of Southern 
publicists, in their adventure for spreading which over the 
free territorj' of Mexico and of the Louisiana Purchase, and 
wherever their greed for unexhausted acreage invited them, 
they proposed to make partners of the Nortliern States. Not 
only so, but they proposed also to employ us on their slave- 
hunts whenever their bondmen, taking the North Star 
for a compass, found their way to freedom, — an office 
which, at the South, stamped the brute who stooped to it 
with the execration and contempt of the whole Southern 
people. 

Lincoln's youth and early manhood were employed in 
such struggles for self-help as his surroundings called 
for. He had lost his mother, a young woman of thirty-five, 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 15 

when he was bat nine, and, illiterate as she was, she had 
been able to add new meaning to the aphorism that great 
characters are not produced except under the smiles of a 
mother who is true to her best ideals. She had lived long 
enough to quicken the intelligence which made Lincoln see 
the sort of food his mental nature craved, and he was able, 
when far-advanced in his wonderful career, to say of her: 
" God bless my mother I All that I am or ever hope to be, 
I owe to her." He had one elder sister, — there were no 
brothers, — and she died before the Lincolns reached Illi- 
nois. Hand in hand they had tramped the prairie each day, 
nine miles out and back, that they might not grow up un- 
schooled. Singularly, while his early experience was in al- 
most every way the opposite of Washington's, there is in 
their careers a point of contact. Both were surveyors of 
land. While Lincoln was piloting the river flat-boat and 
splitting fence-rails, he was at the same time imbibing 
principles and storing up decision. In one respect, at least, 
he had the best of training. He had mastered Euclid, and 
he had learned to face the issues which arose in his path, 
single-handed, and without recourse to advice or books. Of 
all the disputes arising among his fellows he was the accept- 
ed umpire, and in all the frequent attempts at overbearing- 
assumption among his rude compeers he was the self-ap- 
pointed champion and the self-commissioned law-giver, am- 
ply endowed with prowess to enforce his judgments. One 
of his earliest convictions was a detestation of slavery. This 
did not proceed from partiality for the negro. Free blacks, 
as we have seen, were no favorites in the prairie country. The 
general inclination of the Mississippi vaUey was to be rid 
of them. Until he reached New Orleans on his first river- 
passage Lincoln had seen little of slavery. Slave-auctions 
and the inherent abuses of the system confronted him-^ 
here, and he received impressions which stood by him to 
the end. These he epitomized from time to time as oc- 
casion prompted. " If slavery is not wrong nothing is 
wrong" — " A house divided against itself cannot stand " 
— " No man is good enough to be the owner of anybod}^ 
but himself." — But while these convictions strengthened 
with his years, so did the obvious correlative persuasion 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

that under our Constitution the Federal authority had 
nothing whatever to do with slavery in the several states. 
As well might the general government propose to extend 
its control over the distribution of property by will, — over 
the subject of marriage and divorce, — over the requisites 
for citizenship, — over the adjustment of local taxes, — over 
any other strictly state concern, as to attempt intervention 
in the relation of master and slave. The moment the 
general government assumes authoiity over issues from the 
outset reserved to the discretion of tlie States, that mo- 
ment we subject all our traditional, internal state policies 
to the judgment and political action of the whole {people 
of this imperial domain, and we of the older settlements, 
who have wrought out, through centuries of painful and 
laborious struggle, methods of our own, — school systems, 
and highway systems, and tax-adjustments, and municipal 
systems, and industrial systems, measurably satisfactory to 
ourselves, — do not care in every national election to sub- 
mit these methods to review and reversal at the whim of 
Carolina Crackers or of the Cowboys of Colorado. The 
only safety for the future of America, — the only working 
plan of which there is a hope, — is that intended by the 
fathers and now insisted on by the Supreme Tribunal of 
the Nation, and this was Lincoln's lode-star. 

Lincoln took an oath to safeguard the Constitution of 
the United States. The Constitution, in a way, respected 
slavery. Not only did the South insist upon this guar- 
anty : Garrison and Phillips recognized the fact, and de- 
nounced the Constitution accordingly. But the weapon 
for dealing the death-blow to slavery, with which the 
North could not arm Lincoln, the South could and did 
furnish him. Lincoln was pledged to conserve the Union at 
all hazards. Whenever a military necessity in our strug- 
gle for the Union made it fitting to recognize the blacks 
In reducing the war resources of the enemy, or in reenforc- 
ing ours, the Constitution made it the President's duty so 
to recognize them. Lincoln, long schooled in readiness 
tor the providential moment, was prompt to act. To have 
struck too soon would have been to alienate the border- 
slave-states and to have courted invasion He gave due 



BY ROBERT 8. RANTOUL. 17 

warning. The South must give up resistance or give up 
slaveryT She chose the latter. She prepared to arm her 
blacks, and in taking that step she yielded the last issue. 
John Brown's raid, — the horrors of St. Domingo, had lost 
their virtue as a spell to conjure with. 

Some of Lincoln's most trying experiences were reserved 
for the months between the autumn election which had 
won for his career the favoring judgment of the Nation 
and the ending of the war. The election made it clear that 
the war was to be fought out to its legitimate result. The 
Oligarchy of the South was doomed, and was only fight- 
ing for terms. The Mighty Father of Waters at last 
coursed through loyal territory to the sea, and by token 
of that fact the Confederacy was rent in twain. Supplies 
procured in Texas, or bought in Mexico, — arms and am- 
munition delivered from a foreign market in Mexico, 
could no longer cross the Mississippi into Confederate 
territory to subsist the South. The blockade was at last 
complete. Every Southern port was sealed. Sherman's 
march had shown the rebellion to be in a military col- 
lapse, and at the touch of his spear it had crumbled like 
an empty shell. 

The end had come. The high hopes with which the 
South approached the crisis, encouraged for a while by 
temporary successes, had faded one by one. The resour- 
ces which might well have sustained so brave a people 
through a shorter trial had proved inadequate to four years 
of war. Their means were exhausted, and so was their 
public credit. Only courage remained. The statesmen of 
the South had not authority enough to make honorable 
terms and enforce them upon their people. As late as 
October, 1864, their President was saying that he could 
not negotiate, — that the only way he knew of making our 
spaniels respect us was to whip them. His voice was still 
for war. No man had expressed a more persistent deter- 
mination than he, to die in the last ditch. But when the 
last ditch was reached, under circumstances not altogether 
heroic, one look was enough to satisfy the fugi- 
tive War-Lord of the Confederacy that it offered no at- 
tractions as a final resting place for him. The Union 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

was restored and slavery was extinct. But the end was 
not to be reached without new trials of Lincoln's firmness 
and patience. New crops of dragons' teeth seemed to 
spring up about him. To a soul like his, almost morbidly- 
sensitive to the demands of friendship, the suggestions 
his loyal supporters made of this or that impracticable 
short-cut to peace, when peace loomed up so near,— sug- 
gestions which could only be ignored,— cost him the keen- 
est pangs. Greeley, loyal but erratic, who knew so much 
of the situation that he could not suppose it possible for 
any one to know more, pushed himself forward as a self- 
appointed umpire and had to be restrained. The conference 
at Norfolk, between the President and accredited agents of 
the South, threw upon Lincoln the onus of rejecting terms 
which were clearly inadmissible, at a moment when the 
Nation was so weary of the war that almost any terms ac- 
cepted by the President would have been welcomed with 
acclaim. 

Colonel Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who had 
closed one of the noblest records of thirty years' service 
ever accredited to any man in the Senate of the United 
States, and had closed it because the Slave State he had 
honored for a generation felt the need of a spokesman who 
would bow lower than he to the demands of Slavery, visited 
Salem as the guest of Mayor Messervey, just before Seces- 
sion came, and addressed us in the First Baptist Church 
on the topic of the hour. I never forgot the distinct 
portrayal he gave of the conditions which must follow 
the division of the Union by an artificial line of demarka- 
tion between the slave-states and the free. Would the 
Northern Mississippi valley ever submit to pay tribute to 
a foreign power planted at its mouth ? If the South made 
it a gi-ievance now that they got so little help in recovering 
fugitive slaves, what would happen when the fugitives be- 
came much more numerous and the hospitality of the 
North much more spontaneous ? The Canada line would 
practically be brought down to Maryland and Kentucky. 
No line of forts, no military defenses would avail to keep 
the peace, and a protracted border- warfare would result, 
like that between England and Scotland, ending as all 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 19 

such contests must, with the absorption of the weaker by the 
stronger power. Common necessities of defence no lon- 
ger held the Union together. The time had gone by 
when there was anything to apprehend from outside inter- 
ference. Many patriotic people were inclined to listen to 
the seductive plea that we might well say to the revolted 
States, "Wayward sisters! Depart in peace!" Nobody 
who heard Colonel Benton ever again supposed that the 
Mississippi river was to be anything but the water-way of 
a reiinited nation or that the war would close except with 
every revolted State safe moored again at its anchorage 
within the Union. 

One after another, Lincoln's troubles disappeared. The 
rebel Capital, for four years flaunting from her northern 
outposts the flag of treason almost in his face, at last suc- 
cumbed. He entered Richmond on foot without ceremony, 
much more impressed with the prostration of all these 
high hopes, — with all this waste of splendid courage, than 
with any sense of personal exultation. To his great, 
yearning heart the Southern insurgents had never been 
other than his fellow-countrymen, — erring, faulty, they 
might be, but brethren still. He held certain definite 
conceptions of what steps it would be expedient to try 
next as the first essay in restoring the exhausted South. 
These were views which he could not abandon, for his 
whole life-schooling had led up to them. They were views 
in which he might hope to have the support of the saner 
element of Southern statesmanship as fast as that saner 
element was able to make itself felt at home. They were 
views which led him consciously away from the doctrinaire- 
school of statecraft, — the school of which Chase and Sum- 
ner stood forth as eminent exemplars, — and they were 
views which brought him day by day in closer touch with 
two of the purest patriots and profoundest statesmen de- 
veloped by the war, — Senators William Pitt Fessenden 
and Lyman Trumbull. Our own War Governor had made 
himself so much more than a mere local magistrate that 
he was recognized, in company with Curtin of Pennsyl- 
vania and Morton of Indiana, as among the figures of 
national importance. And in laying down his official 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

functions at the end of the war, he expressed, in a fare- 
well address, views which placed him by the side of the 
martyred Lincoln in the practical statesmanship which 
should have been applied to the reconstruction of the 
South. It was a crucial moment when the renascent Re- 
public had need of all her sons. 

But, whether supported or denounced, Lincoln was 
ready with the remedies and measures called for. He 
was neither hasty nor tardy. Tentative in his policy, — 
mindful of the terrible prostration under which the con- 
quered sections of the country groaned, — prompt in his 
sympathetic devotion where help was needed, but by no 
means over-tender, nor reckless in his processes, he was 
fast coming to be accepted as the protector of the South 
and the one monumental figure in all the country in which 
combined the supreme qualities needed for rehabilitation. 
Thus the final summons reached him. The opening scene 
of reconstruction ended his career. If it could ever be 
said without hyperbole of mortal man, " No act of his 
life became him like the leaving of it," — that man was 
Lincoln. If there be one sort of courage higher than all 
others, Lincoln showed the highest. He had risked all 
in an effort to save his country, — following out a line of 
policy which was ingrained in his nature and part and par- 
cel of his substance. The end was clear in sight. The prom- 
ised guerdon seemed within his reach. Yet he did not shrink 
from staking everything which wore the aspect of a per- 
sonal triumph on the success of principles, odious though 
they were to some of his supporters, upon which his policies 
had rested and prevailed. Death came at a moment when he 
might well have been reposing on his laurels and have begun 
to look back with the gratifying sense of duty done 
upon a success without a parallel since Napoleon died. 
But no ! He must push on. Dangers awaited him it 
might be, but duties also. While his country needed ser- 
vice which he believed he could perform, his labors were 
not done. There was no hesitancy. 

"He either loves his fame too much, 

"Or his desert is small, 
"Who fears to put it to the touch, 

"And win or lose it all." 



BY ROBERT S. RANTOUL. 21 

New England and the North swarmed with stalwart 
young men whose social and industrial connections had 
been broken up by four years of service in the ranks, and 
who had observed, in their campaigning through the 
South, her affluence of natural resources — fertile lands, 
inviting the thrifty hand of Northern enterprize, and 
water-power running to waste down hillsides heavy with 
the greenery of virgin forests, — and having seen all this, 
thousands of the disbanded soldiers of the North were 
eager to pursue their fortunes there, rather than return 
to the old New England homesteads to grub a pittance from 
our rocky acres. The North was piled high with accumu- 
lated capital which had been employed in industries cre- 
ated by the war, but which suddenly found itself idle. 
This capital would have sought investment in a reviving 
South, and would have opened to that section a career of 
prosperity it had never known before, had not mismanage- 
ment North and South postponed it all for a generation. 
These glorious possibilities Lincoln foresaw and welcomed. 
But the stroke of the assassin had changed all. Treason 
had done its worst. Yesterday he was but one of thousands, 
struggling like the rest of us in a sacred cause. To-day 
his apotheosis had begun. What men liked in him they 
made haste to study and admire. What men disliked in 
him they made haste to forget. There was little for ob- 
livion and much for gloiy. Lincoln is growing with the 
years. Until he died, Washington stood alone. We who 
knew him, and who took his hand, and heard his honest 
laugh, and saw the sparkle of his eye, must not be blamed 
if we failed to grasp at once, while he was near us, the 
grand proporticms which the perspective of distance in time 
has opened to our ken. The man has never lived — not 
Columbus, — not George III, — not Franklin, — not Wash- 
ington, — who has stamped himself more indelibly upon the 
future of this continent. 



2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Here was a type of the true elder race, 
And one of Plutarch's men talked with us, face to face. 

He knew to bide his time. 

And can his fame abide,— 
Still patient in his simple faith sublime, — 

Till the wise years decide. 
Great Captains, with their guns and drums. 

Disturb our judgment for the hour, 

But at last Silence comes; 
These are all gone, and standing like a tower, 

Our children shall behold his fame, — 
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man; 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise— not blame; 
New birth of our new soil,— the first American ! 



Note on the Illustration. 

The frontispiece preceding this paper is taken from the famous 
Volk Bust of Lincoln, cast from the life-mask made at Springfield in 
June, 1860, just after his nomination for the Presidency. This partic- 
ular copy was procured from the sculptor, Volk, by the painter, 
Ames, after Lincoln's death, and was used by him as the safest guide 
in painting, at the order of the Merchants of Boston, the portrait of 
Lincoln which hangs in Fanueil Hall. It was presented by the artist, 
Ames, to Mr. Rantoul, while he was collector of this port, and was 
left by him, as a transmittendum, at the Salem Custom-House. 

[See the Century Magazine for December, 1881, New Series, Vol. 
II, p. 223: also Vol. Ill, p. 462.] 

The autograph is reproduced, of its actual size, and is taken from 
the Commission issued to Mr. Rantoul as Collector of the Customs 
for this District, dated January 13, 1865. The Commission was signed 
by the President with his first name in full, which is a little unusual. 
It is countersigned: " W. P. Fessenden, Secretary of the Treasury," 



©fascrbauces 



33p tl)f CsQcjr Justitutr 



^t tlje tabernacle Cijurcfj in talent 
Jf ebruarp ttuelbe, nineteen ijunbreb anb nine 




2fn Commcmoiatton of tbr Crntrnntal of tbc 'Btrtb of 

2.intoln 



programme 



Prelude in C Major .... Bac 

I 

HENRY WINSOR PACKARD, Organist 



®®f)ittier's^ Centennial J|pmn 

Our fathers' God ! from out wliose liainl 
The centui'ies fall like grains of sand, 
We meet to-tlay, united, free, 
And loyal to our land and Tliee, 
To thank Thee for the era done. 
And trust Thee for tlie oiH'ning one. 

Here where, of old, by Tliy design. 
The fathers spake that woi-d of Thine 
Whose echo is the glad refrain 
Of rended bolt and falling chain, 
To grace oiu' festal time, from all 
The zones of earth our guests we call. 

Oh! make Thou us, through centin-ies long 
In peace secure, in justice strong; 
Aroimd our gift of Freedom draw 
The safeguards of Thy righteous law; 
And, cast in some di\'iner mokl. 
Let the new cycle sliame the old! 

SALEM ORATORIO SOCIETY 



II 

Address by the Honorable Robert S. Rantoul 



programme 



III 

^Ije i^attlt J^pmn of tfje Republic 

Read by MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE 



Mine eyes have seen llic uloi'V dl' llic coniinL;- <il' the I.nnl: 




'<• is ti-:iiniiliii!i- <iui llic \inla,ii(' w'luTc llic y,rap(s dl wralh 




\v halh loosed Ihc lalclul li-lit iiiii,-' of liis icrrihlc swit'l sv 




His Inilh is iiiarcliini:- on! 




have seen Iliiii in ilic walcli-fircs of a hundnnl circling ca 


m].s: 


■'hey have huillc.l Him an allar in ihe evening dews and i 


am,.s: 


' can read His rii;liicoiis senleiice hy ihe dim and flariiiii 1; 


nips. 


I lis day is marching on! 




lia\c read a fiery gosi)el, writ in burnisheil rows of steel: 




As ye deal willi my contemners, so with you my grace sh 


ill deal! 


.^\ the Hero, horn of woman, ci'ush the serpent with Ins h 


Hi. 


Since Clod is marching on!" 




SALEM ORATORIO SOCIETY 




IV 




Readings by the Honorable Alden P. 

1 


White 


From the Leave-taking at Springfield, 




the Gettysburg Address and the 




Second Inaugural. 





FEB 35 1909 



programme 



"(© Captain! Mv Captain!" 

Verses by WALT WHITMAN 

Music for this Occasion hy JOSHUA PHIPPEN 
Curator of Music at the Institute 

O Captain! my Captain! oui- fearful \vi\) its tlone! 
The sliip has weather'd every wrack, — tlie jirize we sought is won! 
The port is near, — the bells I hear, — the people all exult ing, — 
While follow eyes the steady keel, — the vessel grim ami daring; 
But O heart! heart! heart! 

O the bleeding dro])s of red. 
Where on the deck my ('a]ilain lies. 
Fallen cold and .lead! 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the hells! 
Rise up! — For you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills! 
For you bouquets and ribbon'tl wreaths — for you the shores a-crowdin< 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces tinning. 
Here Captain! dear father! 

This arm beneath your head! 

It is some dream that on ti:e deck, 

You've fallen coUl and dead. 

My Captain tloes not answer! his li])s are pale antl still! 
My father does not feel my arm, — he has no pulse nor will! 
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, — its voyage closed and done! 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won! 
Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells! 

But I, with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

SALEM ORATORIO SOCIETY 



Postlude ..... Guillemant 

HENRY WINSOR PACKARD, Organist 



